Hollow Sun releases Novachord

Hollow Sun has released Novachord, a sample library for Kontakt featuring the sounds of the Hammond Novachord.

With 120 exciting programs and many hundreds of hand crafted, long and luxurious 24-bit multi-samples, this unique collection presents this incredible, innovative – and almost unknown – relic from 1939 as accurately as possible. The Novachord was the world’s first polyphonic synth powered by 163 valves, thousands of capacitors and miles of hand soldered wiring in hand sewn looms encased in a most beautiful wooden cabinet. Such a beast would be an achievement today – that this was a product of 1939 is all the more remarkable.

We have carefully programmed the soundset to be as accurate a representation of ‘the real thing’ as possible such that playing it is as close to having a Novachord in front of you. However, in some programs, we have also taken liberties with modern synth post-processing that Laurens Hammond and his design team could only dream about. I am sure they would be as excited as we are about this soundset if they were around today.

But however much we have mangled the original sound, the character of of the Novachord comes shining through and you can almost smell the bakelite and the musty odour of glowing thermionic valves warming the 70 year old wooden cabinet.